Prevent Wrapping of <code> Tags in Text

By  on  

Writers of technical documentation (or lowly blog writers like myself) oftentimes put property names in <code> tags within blocks of text. Doing so makes reading the text easier and prevents users from misconstruing explanatory text with property names. CSS uses a dash within its property and value names and English uses dashes to signal a place where the line could break the text...see the problem here? The contents of your <code> tag could wrap and that can be unsightly. To prevent that smudge in your otherwise flawless writing, you can use white-space: nowrap:

code {
    white-space: nowrap;
}

The only downside of modifying white-space is that the code could flow well out of its container if the code text is lengthy. I would contend that length property names would be best placed on their own line (in their own block) but that issue is one to keep in mind. You could use text-overflow: ellipsis and a max-width to temper the element width, but the text could then lose its meaning.

It's up to you to decided if this could be safe for your own use. I just think it's a nice little addition to keep your content from breaking in ways you haven't thought of!

Recent Features

  • By
    Serving Fonts from CDN

    For maximum performance, we all know we must put our assets on CDN (another domain).  Along with those assets are custom web fonts.  Unfortunately custom web fonts via CDN (or any cross-domain font request) don't work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (correctly so, by spec) though...

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

  • By
    Prevent Page Zooming in Mobile Browsers

    Ever since I got my iPhone, I've been more agreeable in going places that my fiancee wants to go. It's not because I have any interest in checking out women's shoes, looking at flowers, or that type of stuff -- it's because my iPhone lets...

Discussion

  1. As an in between step or when modifying white-space is unwanted, you could use “‑” to show a dash but not break on it.

  2. Little late to the game here but…

    That’s an interesting problem you bring up at the end there. It is rare to have an inline code tag break out of its container, but there is a way around it. Here it is:

    http://jsbin.com/UQUfuXUX/1/edit

    Two things to note:

    – I’m using a non-breaking hyphen character, inserted with its decimal notation.
    – I’ve added word-wrap: break-word in the CSS to prevent long lines from breaking the container.

    Truthfully, it’s not an ideal solution to do this solely on the front-end. Preferrably you would have some sort of back-end function that automatically replaces hyphens inside of ‘code’ tags with the non-breaking hyphen character.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!